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Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Twins!

We had two more baby goats join our goat family last week!  Farmer had twins, Bushhog Grass and Weedwhacker Bill.


Bushhog Grass is the white one.  GD gave her the middle name of grass so that everyone would know that she was not named after a statue of a bushhog, but a real working bushhog.  The brown one is Weedwhacker Bill, named after farming legend "Tractor Pa."







Monday, June 19, 2017

Mower

    Last Monday evening GD burst in the door and say, "You HAVE to come out to the goats!  Tractor had her baby!"
    I didn't believe him at first, but he said, "It's absolutely true!"
    So I went out to this little thing prancing around the barn yard:




Tractor had somehow silently and unassisted birthed her during the afternoon, and the baby was all cleaned up and happily skipping around.

The baby of course is very loved.






The boys named her Mower.  They evidently at some point discussed it, picked out names, and decided who would get what baby.  GD gets this baby, and GE gets Farmer's baby who will be named Bushhog.  I'm sure if Tractor has twins, the boys will let KM take the other baby, but right now KM is happy to just let Mower climb all over her. 





 In my mind, this photo session was going to yield a darling photo of them both cuddling in the basket and gazing with wide eyes at the camera that I would turn in to a vintage-looking print to hang on our office wall.  But Mower was looking for her mother.





This is how Farmer feels about still being pregnant.


Sunday, June 11, 2017

Expectant Goats

   We kind of know nothing about this whole dairy goat farming thing. Aside from the little G has read online and the vast amounts of goat knowledge GD claims to already have, we're making this up as we go along. Last fall a lady from church who used to raise goats was talking to me about milking goats like I knew everything about it. I just smiled and nodded and directed her to ask my husband if we needed to borrow their stanchion and pretended I knew what a stanchion was.
   The last I wrote we had accepted a candidate for Baby Goat Daddy. Well before he even met our lovely ladies he sent them a Dear Jane letter. I'm sure it said something like , "It's not you, it's me," but we never heard from his owner again. So we had to move on to Bachelor #2.
  We finally introduced Mr. Goat to our females in January. This was much later than originally planned but I didn't mind because I didn't want to share my due date with a couple of goats.  He was very smelly and was with us for about 6 weeks.  Then it was time to just wait to see if anything had happened.
   Supposedly the only way to know if a goat is pregnant is to have a caprine ultrasound done.  Well, that's definitely not in the homestead budget, and we thought we would just have to wait and see if any baby goats showed up this summer.  Every time we went out to see the goats, GE would ask them "Baby in tummy?  Baby in tummy?"
    Hopefully he realizes that it may be fine to ask a goat that, but it is not okay to ask a human female.
   Several weeks ago I began to suspect that we may have one or two pregnant goats.  They seemed fatigued, they were waddling, and they seemed to have developed an almost maternal-like interest in baby KM.  I was pretty sure I could feel baby goat kicks if I pressed my hand up to their bellies long enough.
   Then one day GD went out, looked under them, and loudly proclaimed, "Yep, they're pregnant!  They have udders, so they must be having babies!"
     He just seems to inherently know how this all works.
     Then GD and GE were able to feel the baby goat kicks.
     Which inevitably led to a discussion that added the term "womb" to GD's vocabulary, and a discussion of how only girls have wombs...well, only girl mammals...yes, the girl cat has a womb but no she can't have babies...yes, Mommy has a womb...
     I really don't know why they don't just take middle school health classes out to a barnyard.
     Something I bet you've never stopped to ponder is, "Do pregnant goats have cravings?"
     Well, judging by the amount of times the break out of their fence every day to chow down on the grass in other parts of the yard, I would say yes, they do have cravings.  And they also are very moody.  They go from friendly and wanting attention to head-butting, especially at feeding time.  The one night I sent G out to check on them at 2 in the morning because I heard one of them crying.  The best he could figure out was that Farmer was upset because she saw a deer.
      Goat gestation is around 24 weeks, so we are expectant to have baby goats sometime mid-July to mid-August.